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Minister of Culture: We Will Fund Publication of Handke's Collected Works in Serbian

Minister of Culture: We Will Fund Publication of Handke's Collected Works

Minister of Culture Vladan Vukosavljevic said to the parliament on Wednesday that the publication of collected works by Austrian Nobel Prize winner for literature Peter Handke would be financed from the state budget.

In a part of the session reserved for parliamentary questions, Serbian Radical Party (SRS) MP Aleksandar Seselj asked Vukosavljevic what happened to the party’s initiative, with the help of the state, to publish collected works by Handke, whom Serbian nationalists - not only that most of them have not read any of his books, but they could not even tell titles of two of his books - see him as a great friend of Serbia.

In the 1990s, Handke gained international notoriety because of his understanding of the regime of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

“I was waiting for the contract to be signed and to announce it, and the good news is that the Ministry of Culture and Information provided the funds and reached an agreement with one of Serbia’s reputable publishers to print the collected works of Peter Handke. These will be printed this year and, God willing, it will appear at the Belgrade Book Fair,” Vukosavljevic said.

SRS, which actively incited hatred and whose leader Vojislav Seselj was convicted of war crimes in the 1990s by the Hague Tribunal, is in favor of publishing Handke’s works.

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